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Saturday, January 31, 2015

Ever dreamed of having an Ethernet port in every room? Or having a wireless connection throughout the house without the messy Ethernet cables running through the concealing pipes or through the walls? Well, you can do just that with Ethernet power-line adapters. You can extend your LAN connection through the already present power lines in your home, office, etc.

The technology is called power line communication (PLC). It is a standard that carries data on a conductor which is simultaneously used for electric power transmission. To use your power lines to extend your LAN connection, you need to purchase power line adapters and plug them in to a power socket. There will be a LAN port on the adapters, you need to connect a LAN cable between this port and a port of your main internet router. Plug another adapter in a different power socket where you would like to use the LAN connection. Connect a LAN cable between this adapter and your PC/Laptop. Your device will now be able to connect to the main router and thus to the internet through the power lines.

We will be covering one such power line adapter in brief - TP-LINK AV200+ TL-PA251

Features:

Integrated power socket which allows access to power for other devices.

Data transfer rate of up to 200 Mbps

Mains filter for better performance

Range of up to 300 meters through the electrical wires

Plug and play, no configuration needed

Extending Wi-Fi network through power lines:

In order to extend your Wi-Fi connection over power lines, you need a minimum of two power line adapters. One of the will be connected to your main router and the other to another Wi-Fi router in a different room where you want to deploy the wireless connection. You need to keep the same wireless network parameters such as SSID name, security type and security key in both the routers so that the network deployed by two routers behaves as one big network. Roaming will be automatically enabled.

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Year 2014 was a bad year for aviation, 5 planes belonging to international airlines crashed. The latest one being AirAsia flight QZ8501 which disappeared on December 28, 2014 while en route to Singapore from Surabaya, Indonesia.

The concerned search and rescue agencies did not have a clue about the plane's whereabouts for 2 days. On December 30th, the plane's wreckage was spotted for the first time and three bodies were recovered. More wreckage was spotted and a few more bodies were recovered on the following days.

On 11th January - 14 days after the flight disappeared, it's black box was found by deep sea rescue divers. We will soon know why the plane went down after investigators examine the data from the black box. Some sort of closure for everyone associated with AirAsia flight QZ8501.

Could advanced technologies have done more to locate the crashed plane if not to save it from crashing? Consider Malaysian Airlines flight MH 370 which disappeared on March 8th, 2014. It has been 10 months now and no one knows what happened to the flight.

The questions we are asking are - Why cannot black boxes have a longer battery life? Why cannot planes report their GPS location on a real time basis even when they are about to crash? Why rely only on radars so much? It was revealed that Malaysian Airlines flight MH 370 tried sending engine data to Boeing's maintenance cell via a British satellite. If that data had also contained GPS information then the probability of finding the missing jet would have been high and probably we would have known what had happened to the flight.